Schedule

Notes

9. Ideas for further studies

<sachac> harsha123: If possible, I'd like to go for a straight PhD focusing on either information retrieval (with
possible applications for wearable computing) or computer science education. The former seems a bit more
feasible due to my interest in PlannerMode and personal information management.
<harsha123> sachac: cool!
<sachac> harsha123: If I'm lucky, they'll let me get away with it. =) I might have to go through an MS first, though, as
despite extra studies I know my undergraduate degree's not as rigorous as those offered in other countries, and
my age and gender may raise a few eyebrows... <laugh>
<sachac> arete: So yes, like zoe, except handling RSS feeds and working _all the time._ Similar ideas: dashboard,
remembrance-agent.
<bkhl> sachac, what about language engineering?
<arete> sacha: zoe integrates RSS feeds too
<arete> but it would definitely be nice to have something that can also index your wiki, planner, etc
<sachac> harsha123: I applied for undergrad to a number of US schools and was offered scholarships based on my high SAT
scores, but found the costs a bit prohibitive. =) Worked out.
<sachac> arete: Hey, cool. =)
<arete> zoe is pretty much limited to email and rss
<arete> also it is in java and doesn't seem very configurable =)
<sachac> arete: Yeah. And everything on my hard disk. <laugh>
<harsha123> sachac: i guess you are done with your undergrad now?
<arete> sacha: what would you use for indexing though?
<sachac> bkhl: I'm not particularly into computational linguistics, although I'll need to learn a bit in order to do
parsing well. As for programming language design, not really my kind of thing.
<bkhl> sachac, I was thinking of the prior. Are you talking about NL parsing?
<sachac> arete: If I remember correctly, remembrance-agent used a word-vector, and it performed pretty well - it'd take N
words around your cursor and find similar text. There are other indexing techniques which I'll learn more about
in my research.
<delYsid> sachac: If one spins the thoughts of On Lisp a little bit futher, every Lisp programmer is implicitly a
Language Designer :-)
<bkhl> sachac, in CL-speak that's called n-grams.
<arete> hmm, yeah you'd need something pretty fast
<sachac> arete: Another thing I liked about remembrance-agent was the constant implicit search. Zoe - and Google, for
that matter - require you to do an explicit search. remembrance-agent kept searching based on N words around
your point, which brought up interesting things you might not have otherwise thought of.
<sachac> e1f: I actually have pictures on the Web. <laugh>
<sachac> delYsid: True. =)
<arete> sacha: hmm yeah that would be cool, I remember that looking at it years ago
<sachac> I want this to happen: while I type a blog entry, similar blog entries from other people's blogs will come up.
<sachac> I want it to check my mail. Who would be interested in this sort of thing, based on my correspondence with them?
<harsha123> sachac: hmm.. the idea sounds googlish!
*** LaoTseu ([email protected]) has quit: Remote closed the connection
<sachac> I want to see a self-organizing map of topics. How do my blog entries cluster? What about other people's blogs?
<arete> sacha: yeah, would be very helpful dealing with information overload
<arete> I haven't seen much work in this area
<e1f> harsha123: zoe is described as google for email
<delYsid> what about writing a remembrance-agent alike thing that uses googles soap api to do implicit research?
<delYsid> (+local searches)
<bkhl> sachac, a friend of mine has done something like that, but useful. (It searches libraries for code similar to
what youare writitn.)
<arete> I've been limping along with heirarchical folders and slow searches in exchange
<arete> very inefficient
<arete> I can never remember where I put something
<delYsid> arete: same here
<harsha123> zoe?
<fsbot> zoe is like, see http://zoe.nu/
<lawrence> I haven't written enough stuff for that to be a problem yet
<arete> delysid: looked at zoe? I just installed it again, very nice
<sachac> arete: I've been very happy with M-x remember. I can organize things hierarchically, and I can regexp search
notes. Now I want it to show related topics.
<sachac> =)
<delYsid> what does zoe do?
<harsha123> yeah. what does zoe do? :p
<sachac> delYsid: Indexes your mail, allows you to search, lets you list related people, attachments, links.
<sachac> delYsid: Select a person, it'll list all your correspondence with that person.
<harsha123> sachac: you mean your INBOX>
<delYsid> what ui?
<sachac> bkhl: Sounds interesting.
<arete> delysid: html, it has an internal web server
<sachac> delYsid: Browser.
<delYsid> erk
<lawrence> it looks very mouse-based from the screenshots
<sachac> delYsid: Tables. =|
<sachac> delYsid: However, swish++ and swish are pretty good at full-text indexing...
<sachac> delYsid: ... so a pure Emacs or text-based interface might be doable.
<delYsid> hmm
<lawrence> and trying to debug these kind of things is a nightmare
<lawrence> arete: no
<delYsid> I once wrote code to import a mail folder into a framerd db.
<arete> ahh, I do
<delYsid> that made for nice hyperlinking and searching capabilities...
* e1f tried namazu a while back but it have got very far indexing my home dir-- it's not very robust
<e1f> it didn't get very far
<delYsid> sachac: doesn't Gnus already have a full-text searching feature?
<arete> ick, that sucks
<dto> delYsid: M-s
<sachac> delYsid: Yes, and it has virtual groups, but we want really funky slicing and dicing.
<dto> searches in article text. or to speed it up you can use swish-e and nnir backend, but i haven't tried that
<arete> delysid: it is more than just searching though
<sachac> delYsid: A search with nnir will let you jump to all the messages, but it won't list all the links and people in
another buffer.
<arete> viewing a message in zoe shows you links to everyone involved, the date of the message, etc
<sachac> delYsid: You can't easily switch to the slice showing you all the correspondence with a person.
<arete> all clickable links to bring up the relevant related subjects
<sachac> arete: I'd love it if zoe or a similar tool could not only show me the messages related to a person, but also my
BBDB record, tasks, notes, even schedules related to that person.
<arete> yeah, that would be amazing
<sachac> arete: I almost always hyperlink names, so that's easy enough to index and match. =)
<Nafai> Sounds a bitt like dashboard
<Nafai> s/bitt/bit/
<sachac> Nafai: Yes, I've seen dashboard, and I like its plugin architecture.
<Nafai> sachac: Where's this zoe you are speaking of?
<sachac> Nafai: (That is, different information sources can easily plug into the system.)
<lawrence> , zoe
<fsbot> I think zoe is see http://zoe.nu/
<Nafai> sachac: *nods*
<arete> I'll have to resort to grep for my wiki searches
<sachac> I don't mind constraining development to Emacs - even just a prototype - as Emacs is popular in the wearable
computing world anyway. =)
<arete> fortunately those are in low volume, email is horrible though
<arete> also nice to see all all blog entries on a particular subject
<sachac> arete: I have ~ 3 MB in my wiki, ~ 130 MB in my personal mail.
<arete> sacha: *nod* similar ratio here
<sachac> arete: planner-search-notes does that, if you search by regexp. That catches the ones that you don't already
remember to a particular plan page.
<arete> I need something that indexes IM logs too =)
*** esskay ([email protected]) has quit: Remote closed the connection
<sachac> I love the idea of zoe. I want it to be extremely flexible. I want to hook new data into it easily. =)
<sachac> So, yeah, kinda like dashboard.
<dto> what is zoe
<sachac> arete: My planner config isn't really that complicated. It's.. hmmm. A custom header and footer, depending on
the page name. A lot of loaded modules which usually work without much config. Extra speech for
emacs-wiki-next/previous-reference so that it's easier to use with emacspeak.
<sachac> dto: zoe is a way to search and navigate through e-mail and RSS.
<sachac> , zoe
<fsbot> From memory, zoe is see http://zoe.nu/
<sachac> , dashboard
<fsbot> sachac, Go on, don't be afraid.
<sachac> , dashboard is http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
<fsbot> created.
<sachac> Dashboard is the direction I want to go in. =)

1. Testing xref

I'd love to hear about any questions, comments, suggestions or links that you might have. Your comments will not be posted on this website immediately, but will be e-mailed to me first. You can use this form to get in touch with me, or e-mail me at [email protected] .

Page: 2004.03.13

Updated: 2004-11-2119:44:1419:44:14+0800

NOTE: ANTI-SPAM MEASURE NOW IN PLACE. Please answer the following question with the right number in order to send me your comment.